It was 5° C in the morning today. I didn’t believe Appa when he told me, but then at 10:00 am the thermometer outside said 8°C and there was no denying it.
Yahin itni thand ho rahi hai toh Jammu hi na chale jaayen?
The transfer order was long due. We moved to Lucknow in 1996. The first posting that made Appa move away, and made us a “split establishment” (which is what Amma says when she’s talking about buying home-supplies, groceries) was a transfer to Ranikhet. Baba’s board exams that year. I was in Class 8, so close enough to my own first boards for the folks to not want the kids to change schools. That was in 2000.
Since then Appa has had a series of postings in Inspection and Management Audit, which made his travelling light even more spartan than usual. These were postings of a few months each, sometimes even a few weeks only, taking him upto Trivandrum and back as far north as Kufri; from Calcutta to Surat and everywhere in between.
Last Sunday, he had nothing to do. Rare, since when he’d come home between assignments there’d usually be some repairs or the other to be done, some pending doctor’s appointment of my grandfather to attend to, car insurance payments; the list is long. Last Sunday, he made lunch early, called the car, and took out one of the older model airplanes, a Cessna, to go flying.
Chalo, chalte hain.
He and I drove to Butchery Ground which is on the way to the airport; in between he says, pithily,
Hum yahaan ’82 se aa rahe hain. Yeh sab chhod ke kahin aur chale jaayen?
I was walking around in the mall yesterday, desperately looking for a familiar face. What does Lucknow still have that holds me, like a promise cracked already, about to be broken? There are no reasons, perhaps; at least none stronger than the irrational love that one can have for the smell of the fog.
Kohre ki khushbu, if you can call it that, I’m told.
The other day V came over. We started counting the years; with V now so much of the leap that my heart makes every time I see him (even days when I want to see no one, least of all someone like him, whom I can no longer talk to) is the sheer childish joy that comes from seeing a memory, alive. He counted up to 12, and we were suitably impressed with ourselves. I cannot talk to him like I can talk to my friends in the hostel, but this is of course stating the obvious. Even if our meetings are now a mixture of excavations into a shared past (which sentiment is turning apocryphal) and a floundering attempt to understand the divergent, alien present, my heart still leaps.
The long overdue transfer order has come;
Chandigarh Circle, it says.
Where in the circle? we ask.
Jammu.
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
हो गई है पीर परबत सी, पिघलनी चाहिए
इस हिमालय से कोई गंगा निकालनी चाहिए
हर सड़क, पर हर गली, हर गाँव में
हाथ लहराते हुए हर लाश चलनी चाहिए
सिर्फ़ हंगामा खड़ा करना मेरा मकसद नहीं
मेरी कोशिश है की यह सूरत बदलनी चाहिए
मेरे सीने में नहीं तो तेरे सीने में सही
हो कहीं भी आग लेकिन आग जलनी चाहिए।
by Dushyant दुष्यन्त
इस हिमालय से कोई गंगा निकालनी चाहिए
हर सड़क, पर हर गली, हर गाँव में
हाथ लहराते हुए हर लाश चलनी चाहिए
सिर्फ़ हंगामा खड़ा करना मेरा मकसद नहीं
मेरी कोशिश है की यह सूरत बदलनी चाहिए
मेरे सीने में नहीं तो तेरे सीने में सही
हो कहीं भी आग लेकिन आग जलनी चाहिए।
by Dushyant दुष्यन्त
The Case of the Elusive Curio
They must have been grey.
I never knew the colour of his eyes, but I had heard the soft cadence of his Urdu a thousand times, and once, only once, caught a glimpse of neat fingertips through the chink in the door.
After Nana died, everything went haywire. So what if the girls were going to England to study. They were expected to respect the zenana there as well. God knows whether they ever wore the burqa in London as they were meant to, but we made it clear to them that if they tried to sow wild oats abroad, we would come to know, and consequences would be dire. They lived in Golders’ Green. What did they think? That Ashraf mian and his brothers would not keep an eye on them?
At home, I was very strict about the zenana. I would hear of no frivolities like these girls like to indulge in – giggling away about which boy said what to whom, how he looked at which sister. I know I was one of them, but I was a good ten years older than Rafiya, the next one after me, and you, Shabnam, jaan, whom I had to bring up like a mother after Ammi went.
I was going to be married to Amjad sahab, he was Ammi’s uncle’s grandson, a very bright spark they said. My age, because he had been in Jeddah for several years, unable to afford a ticket back home for a long while. Of course, by the time we were finally married he was rolling in riches, he had bought a Mercedes and what not.
I was really happy with Amjad; it feels so strange, Shabnam, to say his name, but you insist so! Why you want me to, I just cannot understand! But then if you want to hear the story, what can I do, I’ll try.
He treated me very well, you know, he was one of those “modern” types – the sort that wants his wife to talk openly about her desires; you can understand now, jaan, can’t you? You’re a married woman after all. But he was very particular about maintaining the purdah. I’m glad. I did not wish to wear those dresses and hijabs that seemed to be so popular in Jeddah.
But look, you can’t expect me to talk of him without recollecting every old memory...no, not Amjad, I mean him, the one you are so curious about.
He was just a boy, Shabbo, and I was very mature for my age – Ammi went and I had to be strong. He had just come from London, he had met our sisters there on Id-ul-bakr. It was nothing compared with the daawat at home, of course, but I think it was then that he began to think of our family like his own. No one knew why he divorced himself from his real family later – they were the best of people...they say it was because of some girl, it was inappropriate alliance...no one ever knew exactly, but he was lonely even before, a rift was always there. Strange, he would tell me everything, but never this. It was apparent that he was in love with someone; no one could speak like that otherwise. But you know what was surprising – he spoke like a shaayar but wrote rather badly – he was dabbling in Farsi as well as Sanskrit at the time – some fancy research in England. But he was perhaps destined to study language, not master it.
Even so, I don’t know if this was even correct sentence structure, not knowing Farsi myself, but he had just read that famous inscription at Lal Qila and was deep in thought over it for many days. After which he passed a chit to me, in neat, if slightly immature handwriting,
Jahan-e-ishq zaminast
Salim, aashiq haminast
What he meant, I think, was,
There is a world of love on earth,
Salim, the lover is here.
He brooded over this so much, as if it had some hidden meaning. This meaning became clear later, but then I was too thrilled to see his handwriting, and read his poetry, preserve it, rather than hearing it through the crack in the door.
This door was locked. It had been for over a hundred years. This house, you know, was built in Bahadur Shah Zafar’s time, two families made their home in it, a wall was erected, and a door put in place, in simpler times, if ever a neighbourly service be called upon.
Salim began to talk to me by chance; I had just been married, Amjad had flown off to Jeddah again, it would be a year before he could return – some bureaucratic reasons. I was standing there, by the door, on my side of the wall. Nobody was home. I couldn’t stand the silence; said, to no one, “Aaine se baat karoon kya? Shall I talk to the mirrors? Huge mansion of a house and not a soul here”.
And to my surprise, a voice answered, “You can talk to me. I think we both need a friend”. He said “raazdan”, keeper of secrets, so hard to translate that word...
We poured our souls out; he was right, we both needed a friendly ear. After that we began meeting at night, when everyone was asleep. People assumed I could not sleep because Amjad was away, and I was restless. This was very true, but curiosity was what pulled me to the locked door night after night.
I don’t want you to think badly of me, I saw him as a confidante; not really an older brother, because he was younger than me, and boyish in his ways too – raazdan is the only word that can accurately describe it. We never saw each other, it was only fitting. I was, after all, married to Amjad and very much in love with him – perhaps distance did make the heart grow fonder. My letters to Amjad speak as much – I would not show those letters even to you, Shabbo Rani!
But Salim understood me, and my desire to see the world, and how it conflicted with my rigid views about the zenana.
“Your place is not here, begum, it is in the bright yellow afternoon in Hyde Park, in England where the sun shines till ten o’clock in the summer”, he’d say. “Begum, I have found this perfect little spot to hide treasure – where two apple trees crisscross in the park, a left from Speakers’ Corner and fifty feet as the crow flies”.
Such a boy, I tell you, adventure and treasure were no fantasy for him, they were that real.
I met Salim in October, by next September Amjad sent word that he would be returning in two months. The day I received the letter was the day Salim disappeared. No one ever heard of him again, not even when Ariba Hasan, you remember our second cousin, went to Rome and tried to look him up – rumour had it that had been planning to run off to Italy for a long time.
I might have been the last one to speak to Salim before he vanished...
He heard the news of Amjad’s impending return and said mysteriously, “There is something I have ordered to be made for you, begum, in Venice. A curio especially for you, to thank you for your patience. You will find it when the time is right, and I hope you do not find it soon, because I know you would forget me otherwise, but your curiosity will keep you from forgetting!”
I asked him what it was, what curio?
But he said if he tried to pass to me, the crack in the door would open so wide it could never be mended.
“You’ll find it, begum, it rests where you belong”.
Shabnam, I can’t tell you the anguish this little mystery caused me. Amjad, as you know, never returned, God bless his soul. My heart was broken, I was widowed after having spent no more than a few months with my husband. When I needed a friend the most, my Salim was nowhere to be found. I searched high and low for him, and for that accursed curio he had promised me – I was certain it would lead me to him. I asked everyone, I abandoned all shame, revealing I had been talking to him – I was a widow, I had no need for pretence – I had never been in love with Salim, I was not adulterous, he was my friend, keeper of my secrets. I asked everyone we knew, everyone who knew him. By then we had international dialling on our telephone, I telephoned people in Italy whose numbers I had to hunt for like a raving lunatic. I looked for him in London, seeing England through the eyes of our sisters who would call from there, and report, always, nothing, nothing, give it up, Aapi, give it up, he has left us, forget him, have you no shame left, grieve for your dead husband.
It came back to me years later, when you had also moved to London. That is why I let go of any remaining concerns of propriety and asked you and your husband – bless him, he’s a saint – to fly me to England. Don’t feel bad, Shabbo, jaan, I really missed you, but you were not the only reason for my wanting to come here. It came back to me, you see, his silly treasure map! It was in Hyde Park, buried, it had to be!
I wonder sometimes whether it was all a ploy to draw me out of my zenana, travel to his England, his London. But how did he know I would do it for him? Travel all the way? What if I were married still? But these are questions that have no answer, Shabbo, no answer.
This is what I found. It’s a paperweight. I mean it was. Now it’s just fragments, of course. I could see the paper inside it, it was made to be broken to read the note inside the glass.
You can read it, go ahead. It is very simple, all it says is
“It was you, my begum –
Where love exists under the earth,
And the lover is here”
I honestly don’t know whether he is even alive still, but I doubt it, Shabbo. My curiosity led me to the elusive curio, but it can’t lead me to him. How did he know I’d come all this way? I never even loved him. How was he so sure?
You made a mistake, Shabnam, you thought you’d get a mystery story out of me. But this is not the kind of mystery that can ever be solved.
What time is it? Ten? Look outside, I don’t understand this country, the sun is still shining.
[Excuse this random detail: Winner of creative writing contest at Litmus 2008, LSR, DU]
I never knew the colour of his eyes, but I had heard the soft cadence of his Urdu a thousand times, and once, only once, caught a glimpse of neat fingertips through the chink in the door.
After Nana died, everything went haywire. So what if the girls were going to England to study. They were expected to respect the zenana there as well. God knows whether they ever wore the burqa in London as they were meant to, but we made it clear to them that if they tried to sow wild oats abroad, we would come to know, and consequences would be dire. They lived in Golders’ Green. What did they think? That Ashraf mian and his brothers would not keep an eye on them?
At home, I was very strict about the zenana. I would hear of no frivolities like these girls like to indulge in – giggling away about which boy said what to whom, how he looked at which sister. I know I was one of them, but I was a good ten years older than Rafiya, the next one after me, and you, Shabnam, jaan, whom I had to bring up like a mother after Ammi went.
I was going to be married to Amjad sahab, he was Ammi’s uncle’s grandson, a very bright spark they said. My age, because he had been in Jeddah for several years, unable to afford a ticket back home for a long while. Of course, by the time we were finally married he was rolling in riches, he had bought a Mercedes and what not.
I was really happy with Amjad; it feels so strange, Shabnam, to say his name, but you insist so! Why you want me to, I just cannot understand! But then if you want to hear the story, what can I do, I’ll try.
He treated me very well, you know, he was one of those “modern” types – the sort that wants his wife to talk openly about her desires; you can understand now, jaan, can’t you? You’re a married woman after all. But he was very particular about maintaining the purdah. I’m glad. I did not wish to wear those dresses and hijabs that seemed to be so popular in Jeddah.
But look, you can’t expect me to talk of him without recollecting every old memory...no, not Amjad, I mean him, the one you are so curious about.
He was just a boy, Shabbo, and I was very mature for my age – Ammi went and I had to be strong. He had just come from London, he had met our sisters there on Id-ul-bakr. It was nothing compared with the daawat at home, of course, but I think it was then that he began to think of our family like his own. No one knew why he divorced himself from his real family later – they were the best of people...they say it was because of some girl, it was inappropriate alliance...no one ever knew exactly, but he was lonely even before, a rift was always there. Strange, he would tell me everything, but never this. It was apparent that he was in love with someone; no one could speak like that otherwise. But you know what was surprising – he spoke like a shaayar but wrote rather badly – he was dabbling in Farsi as well as Sanskrit at the time – some fancy research in England. But he was perhaps destined to study language, not master it.
Even so, I don’t know if this was even correct sentence structure, not knowing Farsi myself, but he had just read that famous inscription at Lal Qila and was deep in thought over it for many days. After which he passed a chit to me, in neat, if slightly immature handwriting,
Jahan-e-ishq zaminast
Salim, aashiq haminast
What he meant, I think, was,
There is a world of love on earth,
Salim, the lover is here.
He brooded over this so much, as if it had some hidden meaning. This meaning became clear later, but then I was too thrilled to see his handwriting, and read his poetry, preserve it, rather than hearing it through the crack in the door.
This door was locked. It had been for over a hundred years. This house, you know, was built in Bahadur Shah Zafar’s time, two families made their home in it, a wall was erected, and a door put in place, in simpler times, if ever a neighbourly service be called upon.
Salim began to talk to me by chance; I had just been married, Amjad had flown off to Jeddah again, it would be a year before he could return – some bureaucratic reasons. I was standing there, by the door, on my side of the wall. Nobody was home. I couldn’t stand the silence; said, to no one, “Aaine se baat karoon kya? Shall I talk to the mirrors? Huge mansion of a house and not a soul here”.
And to my surprise, a voice answered, “You can talk to me. I think we both need a friend”. He said “raazdan”, keeper of secrets, so hard to translate that word...
We poured our souls out; he was right, we both needed a friendly ear. After that we began meeting at night, when everyone was asleep. People assumed I could not sleep because Amjad was away, and I was restless. This was very true, but curiosity was what pulled me to the locked door night after night.
I don’t want you to think badly of me, I saw him as a confidante; not really an older brother, because he was younger than me, and boyish in his ways too – raazdan is the only word that can accurately describe it. We never saw each other, it was only fitting. I was, after all, married to Amjad and very much in love with him – perhaps distance did make the heart grow fonder. My letters to Amjad speak as much – I would not show those letters even to you, Shabbo Rani!
But Salim understood me, and my desire to see the world, and how it conflicted with my rigid views about the zenana.
“Your place is not here, begum, it is in the bright yellow afternoon in Hyde Park, in England where the sun shines till ten o’clock in the summer”, he’d say. “Begum, I have found this perfect little spot to hide treasure – where two apple trees crisscross in the park, a left from Speakers’ Corner and fifty feet as the crow flies”.
Such a boy, I tell you, adventure and treasure were no fantasy for him, they were that real.
I met Salim in October, by next September Amjad sent word that he would be returning in two months. The day I received the letter was the day Salim disappeared. No one ever heard of him again, not even when Ariba Hasan, you remember our second cousin, went to Rome and tried to look him up – rumour had it that had been planning to run off to Italy for a long time.
I might have been the last one to speak to Salim before he vanished...
He heard the news of Amjad’s impending return and said mysteriously, “There is something I have ordered to be made for you, begum, in Venice. A curio especially for you, to thank you for your patience. You will find it when the time is right, and I hope you do not find it soon, because I know you would forget me otherwise, but your curiosity will keep you from forgetting!”
I asked him what it was, what curio?
But he said if he tried to pass to me, the crack in the door would open so wide it could never be mended.
“You’ll find it, begum, it rests where you belong”.
Shabnam, I can’t tell you the anguish this little mystery caused me. Amjad, as you know, never returned, God bless his soul. My heart was broken, I was widowed after having spent no more than a few months with my husband. When I needed a friend the most, my Salim was nowhere to be found. I searched high and low for him, and for that accursed curio he had promised me – I was certain it would lead me to him. I asked everyone, I abandoned all shame, revealing I had been talking to him – I was a widow, I had no need for pretence – I had never been in love with Salim, I was not adulterous, he was my friend, keeper of my secrets. I asked everyone we knew, everyone who knew him. By then we had international dialling on our telephone, I telephoned people in Italy whose numbers I had to hunt for like a raving lunatic. I looked for him in London, seeing England through the eyes of our sisters who would call from there, and report, always, nothing, nothing, give it up, Aapi, give it up, he has left us, forget him, have you no shame left, grieve for your dead husband.
It came back to me years later, when you had also moved to London. That is why I let go of any remaining concerns of propriety and asked you and your husband – bless him, he’s a saint – to fly me to England. Don’t feel bad, Shabbo, jaan, I really missed you, but you were not the only reason for my wanting to come here. It came back to me, you see, his silly treasure map! It was in Hyde Park, buried, it had to be!
I wonder sometimes whether it was all a ploy to draw me out of my zenana, travel to his England, his London. But how did he know I would do it for him? Travel all the way? What if I were married still? But these are questions that have no answer, Shabbo, no answer.
This is what I found. It’s a paperweight. I mean it was. Now it’s just fragments, of course. I could see the paper inside it, it was made to be broken to read the note inside the glass.
You can read it, go ahead. It is very simple, all it says is
“It was you, my begum –
Where love exists under the earth,
And the lover is here”
I honestly don’t know whether he is even alive still, but I doubt it, Shabbo. My curiosity led me to the elusive curio, but it can’t lead me to him. How did he know I’d come all this way? I never even loved him. How was he so sure?
You made a mistake, Shabnam, you thought you’d get a mystery story out of me. But this is not the kind of mystery that can ever be solved.
What time is it? Ten? Look outside, I don’t understand this country, the sun is still shining.
[Excuse this random detail: Winner of creative writing contest at Litmus 2008, LSR, DU]
Memoirs: Another short story from the archives
I have resisted the strong urge to edit some very awkward sentence construction in this story, and a few terms (esp. “leftists”) which I seem to have used without knowing what they meant! I think the word can be replaced by “extremists”.
I wrote this around 2004, when I was 15 or 16, it’s interesting to go back to old writing and see how, hopefully, you evolve!
Déjà vu
Things have changed. A lot. Who would have thought Kashmir would become independent? It is still hard to believe that now there is no POK or IOK.
Twenty years after Kargil, when the UN Media wing picked me to cover the Kashmir story, I had mixed feelings. I did feel a little apprehensive at first. People like me grew up listening to stories of terrorist attacks and bomb blasts in Kashmir. Once in a while, I would get to hear my parents or some other elderly couple from the N.Y. Tamil Brahmin Society heave a sigh, and wistfully describe their Kulu-Manali honeymoon; how they had never been to The North before: how they hunted for handmade sweaters smuggled from Tibet, because they had none of their own.
But then we would go home to the Indian e-newspages, and scrolling down them, spot another familiar-looking headline with a number next to it, to tell some distant and unconcerned NRIs how many died in the Valley that day.
But I was never really involved with Kashmir otherwise. Not until I met Alok. Even though after the 2017 Autonomy Act terrorist activities were not quite so rampant, the UN Security Council decided it was necessary to send a segment of the Pre-Emptive Forces Volunteers to Kashmir.
And so we met in Jammu. Alok was a volunteer, of course. And I was just the in-house Press. It is funny how our differences never kept us from mailing each other every day, and talking for hours on the phone every night when we got back to the States after our year-long stay in Jammu. He was an immigrant Kashmiri who had moved to D.C. only because his parents didn’t want him to stay on in Kashmir, fearing for his life. I was a second-generation American with my roots in some vague village in Tamil Nadu whose name I didn’t remember. And somewhere along the line, the daily mailing became weekly visits. We were forever hopping flights between New York and D.C.
I have a photograph I always keep in my handbag. A picture of us at the registration office, the marriage certificate in our hands and moony grins on our faces. And on the back, Alok’s scrawled words: “Best Day Ever – 21st September, 2018.”
When I was with him, Kashmir didn’t even feel dangerous. We managed to stay apart till November, and arrange a trip to Kashmir in December, giving the Personnel Wing the excuse that we wanted to record the people’s condition two years after Partition. I was too thrilled to speak when he led me up some old cobbled steps to a cottage in the heart of Jammu, and whispered that we would live there someday. His grandmother had left it to him, knowing that his parents wanted nothing more to do with Kashmir.
March came to the Valley, and brought spring with it, and we were still there, painting the walls ourselves, picking burnt shells out of the weeds in the tiny garden. But at the fag end of March, the natives began to complain of no development in the country; and somewhere in the midst of the brewing confusion, leftists started saying it was the Pandits’ fault – that they did not want for Kashmir to be identified with the Muslims, and so suppressed their interests. But it didn’t even end there. By May, the Islamic fundamentalists were all for declaring Kashmir an Islamic state.
We were stuck in the middle of all this. Alok, impulsive as he was, joined in the Hindu protests, much to my dismay. One Sunday morning he was, for a change, free from the rallies for a while. He was sitting, as I clearly remember, on the bed, clipping his toenails, with an old newspaper under his feet to catch the clippings. It was just then that the call came from HQ, N.Y. The PEF was on its way. Within the hour, the chartered Concorde landed; and we, even myself, a mere reporter, were supplied with bullet-proof vests and ammo. But the crash course in firearm handling did nothing to make me feel less insecure or afraid.
Before I knew it, the Team actually had to go out and physically stop the leftists from killing every Hindu in sight. I took the red sticker-bindi; which my mother insisted I should wear; off my forehead, and removed from the bookshelf the Bhagwad Gita which I used to recite from, uselessly; trying as NRIs say, to “preserve our culture”. But now I had our lives to preserve. I burnt the book, and along with it all other signs of our being Hindus. I would have to just leave everything else as it was and join Volunteeers. But in the meantime, I found, another segment had been flown in from Geneva; and I, inexperienced as I was, was designated as “Reserve”. I would only be sent out when ten or more had been lost. Alok had been with the PEF for six years. He was told to lead.
Two days later, we cheered when we heard that the first segment had been successful, and the leftists were calming down, preparing for negotiation. But we all fell silent, because their success was not the only news. Four men had been lost. Shot through the head, killed instantly. And as I listened to their names, I had a feeling of growing dread. It was announced then: “Our friend and partner of six years. A native. Alok Kaul.”
I remember telling the others I needed to be alone for a while, and walking back to the house. I unlocked the door and stepped in, my eyes bloodshot and my head throbbing. By the door, I found his shoes. Those ridiculous soccer shoes with spikes on them, And next to them the old toothbrush he used to clean them with. I walked to the small round table where we did everything from cutting vegetables to planning fantastic and impossible holidays. There was a large white handkerchief on it. Folded and ironed, He hadn’t taken it with him when he rushed out. I picked it up, only to find that silly picture of me in a baseball cap, warped by having been in his wallet so long. And on the bed was an old newspaper, and on it the toenails Alok had clipped. I cried all evening.
Two more months and I was back in N.Y. On the flight back from Delhi an American stewardess looked at me, smiled, and politely asked, “How many months?” I was startled. It took me a few seconds to understand what she had just asked me. The fact that I was pregnant was probably the last thing on my mind then. I absently replied that she was due in September.
Things had changed. A lot. Who ever thought last December that a year from then, I would be back in Jammu. Without Alok. I took the Concorde from Delhi, and spent an entire two days in Jammu only because there was a flight only alternate days. I had done my homework. In N.Y. itself, I had found someone interested in buying the house, especially since the riots seemed to have died down again. All I had to do was sign on a few dotted lines. The estate agent did the rest. I stepped up those old cobbled steps and ran my hand over the walls we painted, the window-panes we polished – and I took off my shoes and felt, for the last time, the cold mosaic.
On the flight back from Delhi, an American stewardess looked at me, remembered, and smiled. She asked me how my baby girl was doing. I smiled back. There was no point, really, in telling this enthusiastic kid the baby had been stillborn. She was curious to know what I had named her. “Kashmir”, I said. She smiled her plastic smile and said, “That’s a really pretty name. Kind of gives you a déjà vu.”
And when I got off that plane, I was sad. And I knew Alok would have been too. Because finally, that is what Kashmir is now. A pretty name and a déjà vu.
Déjà vu
Things have changed. A lot. Who would have thought Kashmir would become independent? It is still hard to believe that now there is no POK or IOK.
Twenty years after Kargil, when the UN Media wing picked me to cover the Kashmir story, I had mixed feelings. I did feel a little apprehensive at first. People like me grew up listening to stories of terrorist attacks and bomb blasts in Kashmir. Once in a while, I would get to hear my parents or some other elderly couple from the N.Y. Tamil Brahmin Society heave a sigh, and wistfully describe their Kulu-Manali honeymoon; how they had never been to The North before: how they hunted for handmade sweaters smuggled from Tibet, because they had none of their own.
But then we would go home to the Indian e-newspages, and scrolling down them, spot another familiar-looking headline with a number next to it, to tell some distant and unconcerned NRIs how many died in the Valley that day.
But I was never really involved with Kashmir otherwise. Not until I met Alok. Even though after the 2017 Autonomy Act terrorist activities were not quite so rampant, the UN Security Council decided it was necessary to send a segment of the Pre-Emptive Forces Volunteers to Kashmir.
And so we met in Jammu. Alok was a volunteer, of course. And I was just the in-house Press. It is funny how our differences never kept us from mailing each other every day, and talking for hours on the phone every night when we got back to the States after our year-long stay in Jammu. He was an immigrant Kashmiri who had moved to D.C. only because his parents didn’t want him to stay on in Kashmir, fearing for his life. I was a second-generation American with my roots in some vague village in Tamil Nadu whose name I didn’t remember. And somewhere along the line, the daily mailing became weekly visits. We were forever hopping flights between New York and D.C.
I have a photograph I always keep in my handbag. A picture of us at the registration office, the marriage certificate in our hands and moony grins on our faces. And on the back, Alok’s scrawled words: “Best Day Ever – 21st September, 2018.”
When I was with him, Kashmir didn’t even feel dangerous. We managed to stay apart till November, and arrange a trip to Kashmir in December, giving the Personnel Wing the excuse that we wanted to record the people’s condition two years after Partition. I was too thrilled to speak when he led me up some old cobbled steps to a cottage in the heart of Jammu, and whispered that we would live there someday. His grandmother had left it to him, knowing that his parents wanted nothing more to do with Kashmir.
March came to the Valley, and brought spring with it, and we were still there, painting the walls ourselves, picking burnt shells out of the weeds in the tiny garden. But at the fag end of March, the natives began to complain of no development in the country; and somewhere in the midst of the brewing confusion, leftists started saying it was the Pandits’ fault – that they did not want for Kashmir to be identified with the Muslims, and so suppressed their interests. But it didn’t even end there. By May, the Islamic fundamentalists were all for declaring Kashmir an Islamic state.
We were stuck in the middle of all this. Alok, impulsive as he was, joined in the Hindu protests, much to my dismay. One Sunday morning he was, for a change, free from the rallies for a while. He was sitting, as I clearly remember, on the bed, clipping his toenails, with an old newspaper under his feet to catch the clippings. It was just then that the call came from HQ, N.Y. The PEF was on its way. Within the hour, the chartered Concorde landed; and we, even myself, a mere reporter, were supplied with bullet-proof vests and ammo. But the crash course in firearm handling did nothing to make me feel less insecure or afraid.
Before I knew it, the Team actually had to go out and physically stop the leftists from killing every Hindu in sight. I took the red sticker-bindi; which my mother insisted I should wear; off my forehead, and removed from the bookshelf the Bhagwad Gita which I used to recite from, uselessly; trying as NRIs say, to “preserve our culture”. But now I had our lives to preserve. I burnt the book, and along with it all other signs of our being Hindus. I would have to just leave everything else as it was and join Volunteeers. But in the meantime, I found, another segment had been flown in from Geneva; and I, inexperienced as I was, was designated as “Reserve”. I would only be sent out when ten or more had been lost. Alok had been with the PEF for six years. He was told to lead.
Two days later, we cheered when we heard that the first segment had been successful, and the leftists were calming down, preparing for negotiation. But we all fell silent, because their success was not the only news. Four men had been lost. Shot through the head, killed instantly. And as I listened to their names, I had a feeling of growing dread. It was announced then: “Our friend and partner of six years. A native. Alok Kaul.”
I remember telling the others I needed to be alone for a while, and walking back to the house. I unlocked the door and stepped in, my eyes bloodshot and my head throbbing. By the door, I found his shoes. Those ridiculous soccer shoes with spikes on them, And next to them the old toothbrush he used to clean them with. I walked to the small round table where we did everything from cutting vegetables to planning fantastic and impossible holidays. There was a large white handkerchief on it. Folded and ironed, He hadn’t taken it with him when he rushed out. I picked it up, only to find that silly picture of me in a baseball cap, warped by having been in his wallet so long. And on the bed was an old newspaper, and on it the toenails Alok had clipped. I cried all evening.
Two more months and I was back in N.Y. On the flight back from Delhi an American stewardess looked at me, smiled, and politely asked, “How many months?” I was startled. It took me a few seconds to understand what she had just asked me. The fact that I was pregnant was probably the last thing on my mind then. I absently replied that she was due in September.
Things had changed. A lot. Who ever thought last December that a year from then, I would be back in Jammu. Without Alok. I took the Concorde from Delhi, and spent an entire two days in Jammu only because there was a flight only alternate days. I had done my homework. In N.Y. itself, I had found someone interested in buying the house, especially since the riots seemed to have died down again. All I had to do was sign on a few dotted lines. The estate agent did the rest. I stepped up those old cobbled steps and ran my hand over the walls we painted, the window-panes we polished – and I took off my shoes and felt, for the last time, the cold mosaic.
On the flight back from Delhi, an American stewardess looked at me, remembered, and smiled. She asked me how my baby girl was doing. I smiled back. There was no point, really, in telling this enthusiastic kid the baby had been stillborn. She was curious to know what I had named her. “Kashmir”, I said. She smiled her plastic smile and said, “That’s a really pretty name. Kind of gives you a déjà vu.”
And when I got off that plane, I was sad. And I knew Alok would have been too. Because finally, that is what Kashmir is now. A pretty name and a déjà vu.
Memoirs: The One And Only work of mine that ever went into print
Click on images to read. Text not typed out for copyright reasons.
I wrote this short story for an on-the-spot thing in 2004, it got selected in a national contest and happened to win.
Sigh. I still bask in old glory. Drat it. No new glory!
And please excuse the couple of typos. No editing allowed, you see. Click on images to enlarge to readable size.
Samina Mishra's original article: Being Muslim in India
This is a piece I wrote for India Today but the version that has appeared in the magazine is an edit that I did not agree to. It's not clear to me how that happened since I edited the longer article down to this final version and sent it in to them. But the magazine is out and I am both angry and saddened at their careless editing of ideas that are particularly under siege at this point of time.
So, here is my edit and I would be glad if it was circulated widely on the net - more widely than the magazine!
Samina
Not far from L18, in the posh part of Jamia Nagar, is a house on a tree-lined avenue that will always be home to me. But my life, with all its easy privileges, could not be more different from Atif and Sajid's, the two young men shot as alleged terrorists at L18. I contain multitudes, Whitman so eloquently said. But we live in a time when even multitudes are forced to lay claim to a singular label. And so by writing this, perhaps, I will forever be labelled the voice of the liberal secular Muslim. A voice that is accused of not speaking up. Ironically, it is this very tyranny of labels that grants me this space in a mainstream national magazine.
As someone with a Muslim first name and a Hindu surname, I suppose I have always swung between labels - a poster girl for communal harmony or a confused, rootless individual, depending on who was doing the labelling. I went to a public school and have never worn a burkha. I might escape being thrown in the big cauldron with "Islamic Terrorists" but I will certainly be added to the one for "misguided intellectuals". While there is no mistaking that it is zealous nationalists who seek to light the fire under the first cauldron, the other is a bone of contention between those who seek to define for me how to be Indian and those who seek to define for me how to be Muslim. My condemnation of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Imrana's rape or the media circus around Gudiya will always be seen in the context of my privileged background, my gender, my religious identity. Perhaps, it can be no other way.
In this rhetoric of binaries of "us and them", it is difficult to find the space to create a new paradigm of discussion. And so, in conversations that throw up Islamic terrorists, rigid religious beliefs, Pakistan and madrasas, the response is inevitably another set of questions - why is the Bajrang Dal not labelled a terrorist outfit, why is the growing public display of Hindu festivals like Navratras and Karva Chauth not considered rigid religious beliefs, why should Muslims in India be answerable for what goes on in Pakistan, what spaces other than madrasas are available for thousands of believing Muslims who choose to get educated and still retain their Muslim-ness. As a Muslim in India today, not only are you fighting to shrug off the label of fundamentalist- if not terrorist - but you are also succumbing to a paradigm of dialogue which has been set for homogenous communities with clear markers of identities.
But how does one fight that when shared cultural spaces, other than those created by the market, shrink? How does one speak of the diversity of being Indian when Diwali is celebrated in schools and Eid just in Muslim homes? How does one avoid a singular label for experiences that are diverse and yet have a common thread running through them - the experience of a tailor in Ahmedabad whose Hindu patrons have stopped giving work to, the butcher in Batla House who couldn't get a bank loan, the software professional who will now have to watch every single byte that leaves his computer.
Being Muslim in India today means many things to many people. But how easy it is to forget that one fundamental reality. How easy it is to say, as someone said to me after the Delhi blasts - "These are all educated Muslims. Don't they know that their bombs can also kill their own?" As if everyone with a Muslim name is a terrorist's very "own".
So, here is my edit and I would be glad if it was circulated widely on the net - more widely than the magazine!
Samina
Not far from L18, in the posh part of Jamia Nagar, is a house on a tree-lined avenue that will always be home to me. But my life, with all its easy privileges, could not be more different from Atif and Sajid's, the two young men shot as alleged terrorists at L18. I contain multitudes, Whitman so eloquently said. But we live in a time when even multitudes are forced to lay claim to a singular label. And so by writing this, perhaps, I will forever be labelled the voice of the liberal secular Muslim. A voice that is accused of not speaking up. Ironically, it is this very tyranny of labels that grants me this space in a mainstream national magazine.
As someone with a Muslim first name and a Hindu surname, I suppose I have always swung between labels - a poster girl for communal harmony or a confused, rootless individual, depending on who was doing the labelling. I went to a public school and have never worn a burkha. I might escape being thrown in the big cauldron with "Islamic Terrorists" but I will certainly be added to the one for "misguided intellectuals". While there is no mistaking that it is zealous nationalists who seek to light the fire under the first cauldron, the other is a bone of contention between those who seek to define for me how to be Indian and those who seek to define for me how to be Muslim. My condemnation of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Imrana's rape or the media circus around Gudiya will always be seen in the context of my privileged background, my gender, my religious identity. Perhaps, it can be no other way.
In this rhetoric of binaries of "us and them", it is difficult to find the space to create a new paradigm of discussion. And so, in conversations that throw up Islamic terrorists, rigid religious beliefs, Pakistan and madrasas, the response is inevitably another set of questions - why is the Bajrang Dal not labelled a terrorist outfit, why is the growing public display of Hindu festivals like Navratras and Karva Chauth not considered rigid religious beliefs, why should Muslims in India be answerable for what goes on in Pakistan, what spaces other than madrasas are available for thousands of believing Muslims who choose to get educated and still retain their Muslim-ness. As a Muslim in India today, not only are you fighting to shrug off the label of fundamentalist- if not terrorist - but you are also succumbing to a paradigm of dialogue which has been set for homogenous communities with clear markers of identities.
But how does one fight that when shared cultural spaces, other than those created by the market, shrink? How does one speak of the diversity of being Indian when Diwali is celebrated in schools and Eid just in Muslim homes? How does one avoid a singular label for experiences that are diverse and yet have a common thread running through them - the experience of a tailor in Ahmedabad whose Hindu patrons have stopped giving work to, the butcher in Batla House who couldn't get a bank loan, the software professional who will now have to watch every single byte that leaves his computer.
Being Muslim in India today means many things to many people. But how easy it is to forget that one fundamental reality. How easy it is to say, as someone said to me after the Delhi blasts - "These are all educated Muslims. Don't they know that their bombs can also kill their own?" As if everyone with a Muslim name is a terrorist's very "own".
उन्होंने मस्जिद गिरा दी, ना
[
Much as I wanted this account to be as honest as possible, it didn't seem right to extend that transparency to the lives of those about whom I was writing. The details about my family are all true, anything marked with an asterisk (*) has been changed to protect the identities of those mentioned.
The issue of why I felt the need to make this change can fill many more posts!
]
Seher Khan* is a remarkable woman. I don't know her maiden name, in fact I don't know much about her at all; you wouldn't think she was anything special if you went to her house, because it just isn't done, talking about oneself, and one's experience(s) to strangers, especially if you are the lady of the house.
But even then, I know aunty is remarkable, because I know her daughter. To call Sabah* my best friend would be understating our relationship greatly. Sabah and I grew up together, both feeling slightly out of place in Lucknow; I had come from Lagos and she from Bombay. Our baby pictures look exactly the same, uncannily so; we were both born of displaced urban confusion, unlike most of our classmates here.
I knew some things: aunty knew how to make hummus, she used to watch Happy Days and The Bold and the Beautiful on TV, read novels before bed. When I went to their house for the first time I discovered a Turkish cook-book. She and her siblings had grown up in Saudi Arabia*, where her father was working then. As kids, things tend to become exaggerated in our heads, I always thought (until recently) that she was Arab*.
She was different, but not evidently so, she might have just been a cool mom. Meanwhile Sabah, her sister Sameera* (whom I have never managed to call baaji or aapa, she's just a year older than us), her younger sister Shazia* (who has played, literally, in my lap, when she was little) and I got to know each other.
I don't know how prudent it is to put up such an account on the internet, or whether I have any right to give details, but I cannot tell her story without her name, her identity.
[This post has subsequently been edited]
So let me put it this way; I know from Sabah's accounts (from the spoken or the unspoken?) that her mother has been a tower of strength and support for her daughters through some trying times as far as their education is concerned, and had managed to yet create and re-create herself: she recently finished her BA in Sociology by correspondence, she is more in touch with current affairs than most people from my generation or hers, she keeps herself on her toes, notwithstanding the trouble her back gives her.
Sabah is not home these days, she is in the second year of her BA at a reputed college* in Mumbai; we will not graduate in the same year, since she, like so many others, dropped a year to prepare for Medical. Needless to say, she is not in that line of work now.
Amma and I went to her house the day after Id, we didn't get a chance to go on the day of the festival. Aunty and Amma, we've always felt, (Sabah and I), have some connection - they seem to understand each other. Perhaps simply because two things not equal to anything else may be equal to each other...
On Id, your identity is so much more pronounced. It is not a simple matter of going to someone's house, Id milna for me (and I think Amma also feels this way) is a powerful statement, one that we will have failed in making if we do not manage to do. It was after the Delhi blasts too. I don't remember how the conversation started, or where it was heading, but she began to tell us of her days in Delhi right after she got married: she was talking about 1984, the riots. How it was unbearable, the stifling atmosphere, shops shutting at 7 pm, not a soul on the streets. How it could be me next.
We were in Nigeria when Babri Masjid happened, Appa had just been posted to Lagos, we had moved there in September, 1992. It didn't mean much to us, I think. I wouldn't know, I suppose, I was very young, but I think it's pretty telling that I hadn't so much as heard of the riots till I was maybe 14 or so, an certainly not of the demolition till a little later still. I saw Mani Ratnam's film Bombay I think in 2005, and couldn't believe my eyes. And Bombay is not, mind you, a very scary film, in that its ending is so very idealistic. Even Amma mentioned once that till they saw the movie, the magnitude of the massacre had not registered..
For the Khans, I cannot even begin to imagine what it was like.
I just phoned Sabah to ask her where they were in December '92, January '93, she remembers being in Bombay on vacation, they were living in Lucknow by then. They were at her naani's place, in Andheri. Sabah would have been about to turn 5 in a few months. She remembers talk of somebody's house getting burned down. She knows the stories of Hindus, the neighbours, going to camps at night, camps run by the Shiv Sena.
I don't know if I remember right, but I think Seher aunty was in Lucknow when she heard the news that the masjid had been broken; she and other women were supposed to stay indoors, at some safe place, in case things got out of hand.
In Saudia, she said, everybody was Muslim...your identity became "Indian". She never thought then that the kind of horrors that have been perpetrated in India now, were possible in India. It can't happen in my country.
When she heard what was happening, she thought, it can't happen in India, no, not if it's illegal, the law's in place, it can't happen.
उन्होंने मस्जिद गिरा दी, ना
It was a drastic loss of faith for me.
Later, she was talking about the visitors on Id, how they display their austerity, the stricter you are keeping every roza and praying religiously, the more your brownie points. You are looked down upon if the display in your house is less then that in your neighbours'. Tiny children are shown off if they keep fast.
I think my mother was a genius!
She says this laughingly, but the irony is not that her mother, Sabah's naani was a genius, but that she would never be ackowledged as one, not for her views. Her children were brought up learning the principles of Islam, they grew up following the tenets of Islam without knowing it. Then whatever rituals they choose to follow are that: chosen.
This does not mean Seher Khan is an iconoclast. I don't think she is. The customs in their house are not broken. But where is the scope for free thought within religion?
She fears she'll be next. My mother does too. They feel like targets, sitting ducks. Why? Because they are the liberals. They enemy within the home, the traitors. How does one have a balanced opinion without feeling threatened?
The Shiv Sena can catch me and put me in jail if I meet my boyfriend on Valentine's Day.
It seems to be hep to be an atheist. Or agnostic. Or one of those categories of unbelievers. What if I want to believe in GOD, and in a HINDU GOD, but still retain my relationship with my friends, people I love?
There are comments you hear, in your own house. There are BJP supporters in your workplace. There are Hindu children who know no better than to ape what they hear, and these children hate Muslims.
I remember a particularly self-righteous child, one year my junior, in school. I was in class 5, I think, so he would have been in class 4. We were in the choir group and the swimming team together. I was once (between song practices), describing दही चावल (dahi-chaaval, curd-rice, a quintessentially Tamil meal-ender) to somebody. Then for some reason I started saying that the South Indian Diwali is not on the same day as it is in Lucknow, because the culture is different there. In a way that only children can pronounce judgement, he said, snootily, "इनके तो cultures ही अलग होते हैं!"
Why have I never forgotten this? I know it is the nonsense of a ten-year old, but then I wonder. This is too silly to even be quoted, really. But I still wonder.
You are still a child at 14-15. There were children in the Bombay riots. Rioting. I'm not talking of the victims, although they are victims in a rather peculiar sense...it wasn't like only 50 year old पुजारीs (pujaaris, Hindu priests) were in the riot. It wasn't Hindu fundamentalists. They might have started it, but they didn't do it all. It was people like you and me.
Listen to your children. Watch out for what they say, because we often don't check ourselves before we make a prejudiced remark; we don't know we made it. Watch out for what they say, they say what we say. Catch yourself. Don't do it, don't look at the dashboard or the windscreen, from the inside of the auto-rickshaw, to see whether there is a 786 anywhere, or a Hanuman, a Jai Mata Di, or a Guru Nanak.
I don't know what my point is; or whether this was supposed to have a point.
The liberals, the fundamentalists, they're all the same. Bottomline, peer pressure doesn't happen only to teenagers. How far are we from being fundamentalists? How close to it?
I added this article [written by Samina Mishra] to my blog as an act of...solidarity? I don't know exactly how to say it. I didn't think the article was making any point. I told Sabah as much. But now I realise that it is incredibly difficult to make a point. To take a stand.
It has taken me years to write this; I have been wanting to write about my relationship with Sabah for so long. Why has is taken so long for me to write it? I'm a writer, after all!
When we were about 10-12, our group in school (it was a co-ed, but groups are one sex only!) had me (Tamil), Sabah (Muslim), Mouli* (Bengali) and Chanchal* (Punjabi). We were really proud of this. We knew we were different. We are, naturally. But we were happy about it. How strange it sounds now.
Why is Seher Khan a remarkable woman? I don't know exactly, but she certainly inspired me to write this.
Much as I wanted this account to be as honest as possible, it didn't seem right to extend that transparency to the lives of those about whom I was writing. The details about my family are all true, anything marked with an asterisk (*) has been changed to protect the identities of those mentioned.
The issue of why I felt the need to make this change can fill many more posts!
]
Seher Khan* is a remarkable woman. I don't know her maiden name, in fact I don't know much about her at all; you wouldn't think she was anything special if you went to her house, because it just isn't done, talking about oneself, and one's experience(s) to strangers, especially if you are the lady of the house.
But even then, I know aunty is remarkable, because I know her daughter. To call Sabah* my best friend would be understating our relationship greatly. Sabah and I grew up together, both feeling slightly out of place in Lucknow; I had come from Lagos and she from Bombay. Our baby pictures look exactly the same, uncannily so; we were both born of displaced urban confusion, unlike most of our classmates here.
I knew some things: aunty knew how to make hummus, she used to watch Happy Days and The Bold and the Beautiful on TV, read novels before bed. When I went to their house for the first time I discovered a Turkish cook-book. She and her siblings had grown up in Saudi Arabia*, where her father was working then. As kids, things tend to become exaggerated in our heads, I always thought (until recently) that she was Arab*.
She was different, but not evidently so, she might have just been a cool mom. Meanwhile Sabah, her sister Sameera* (whom I have never managed to call baaji or aapa, she's just a year older than us), her younger sister Shazia* (who has played, literally, in my lap, when she was little) and I got to know each other.
I don't know how prudent it is to put up such an account on the internet, or whether I have any right to give details, but I cannot tell her story without her name, her identity.
[This post has subsequently been edited]
So let me put it this way; I know from Sabah's accounts (from the spoken or the unspoken?) that her mother has been a tower of strength and support for her daughters through some trying times as far as their education is concerned, and had managed to yet create and re-create herself: she recently finished her BA in Sociology by correspondence, she is more in touch with current affairs than most people from my generation or hers, she keeps herself on her toes, notwithstanding the trouble her back gives her.
Sabah is not home these days, she is in the second year of her BA at a reputed college* in Mumbai; we will not graduate in the same year, since she, like so many others, dropped a year to prepare for Medical. Needless to say, she is not in that line of work now.
Amma and I went to her house the day after Id, we didn't get a chance to go on the day of the festival. Aunty and Amma, we've always felt, (Sabah and I), have some connection - they seem to understand each other. Perhaps simply because two things not equal to anything else may be equal to each other...
On Id, your identity is so much more pronounced. It is not a simple matter of going to someone's house, Id milna for me (and I think Amma also feels this way) is a powerful statement, one that we will have failed in making if we do not manage to do. It was after the Delhi blasts too. I don't remember how the conversation started, or where it was heading, but she began to tell us of her days in Delhi right after she got married: she was talking about 1984, the riots. How it was unbearable, the stifling atmosphere, shops shutting at 7 pm, not a soul on the streets. How it could be me next.
We were in Nigeria when Babri Masjid happened, Appa had just been posted to Lagos, we had moved there in September, 1992. It didn't mean much to us, I think. I wouldn't know, I suppose, I was very young, but I think it's pretty telling that I hadn't so much as heard of the riots till I was maybe 14 or so, an certainly not of the demolition till a little later still. I saw Mani Ratnam's film Bombay I think in 2005, and couldn't believe my eyes. And Bombay is not, mind you, a very scary film, in that its ending is so very idealistic. Even Amma mentioned once that till they saw the movie, the magnitude of the massacre had not registered..
For the Khans, I cannot even begin to imagine what it was like.
I just phoned Sabah to ask her where they were in December '92, January '93, she remembers being in Bombay on vacation, they were living in Lucknow by then. They were at her naani's place, in Andheri. Sabah would have been about to turn 5 in a few months. She remembers talk of somebody's house getting burned down. She knows the stories of Hindus, the neighbours, going to camps at night, camps run by the Shiv Sena.
I don't know if I remember right, but I think Seher aunty was in Lucknow when she heard the news that the masjid had been broken; she and other women were supposed to stay indoors, at some safe place, in case things got out of hand.
In Saudia, she said, everybody was Muslim...your identity became "Indian". She never thought then that the kind of horrors that have been perpetrated in India now, were possible in India. It can't happen in my country.
When she heard what was happening, she thought, it can't happen in India, no, not if it's illegal, the law's in place, it can't happen.
उन्होंने मस्जिद गिरा दी, ना
It was a drastic loss of faith for me.
Later, she was talking about the visitors on Id, how they display their austerity, the stricter you are keeping every roza and praying religiously, the more your brownie points. You are looked down upon if the display in your house is less then that in your neighbours'. Tiny children are shown off if they keep fast.
I think my mother was a genius!
She says this laughingly, but the irony is not that her mother, Sabah's naani was a genius, but that she would never be ackowledged as one, not for her views. Her children were brought up learning the principles of Islam, they grew up following the tenets of Islam without knowing it. Then whatever rituals they choose to follow are that: chosen.
This does not mean Seher Khan is an iconoclast. I don't think she is. The customs in their house are not broken. But where is the scope for free thought within religion?
She fears she'll be next. My mother does too. They feel like targets, sitting ducks. Why? Because they are the liberals. They enemy within the home, the traitors. How does one have a balanced opinion without feeling threatened?
The Shiv Sena can catch me and put me in jail if I meet my boyfriend on Valentine's Day.
It seems to be hep to be an atheist. Or agnostic. Or one of those categories of unbelievers. What if I want to believe in GOD, and in a HINDU GOD, but still retain my relationship with my friends, people I love?
There are comments you hear, in your own house. There are BJP supporters in your workplace. There are Hindu children who know no better than to ape what they hear, and these children hate Muslims.
I remember a particularly self-righteous child, one year my junior, in school. I was in class 5, I think, so he would have been in class 4. We were in the choir group and the swimming team together. I was once (between song practices), describing दही चावल (dahi-chaaval, curd-rice, a quintessentially Tamil meal-ender) to somebody. Then for some reason I started saying that the South Indian Diwali is not on the same day as it is in Lucknow, because the culture is different there. In a way that only children can pronounce judgement, he said, snootily, "इनके तो cultures ही अलग होते हैं!"
Why have I never forgotten this? I know it is the nonsense of a ten-year old, but then I wonder. This is too silly to even be quoted, really. But I still wonder.
You are still a child at 14-15. There were children in the Bombay riots. Rioting. I'm not talking of the victims, although they are victims in a rather peculiar sense...it wasn't like only 50 year old पुजारीs (pujaaris, Hindu priests) were in the riot. It wasn't Hindu fundamentalists. They might have started it, but they didn't do it all. It was people like you and me.
Listen to your children. Watch out for what they say, because we often don't check ourselves before we make a prejudiced remark; we don't know we made it. Watch out for what they say, they say what we say. Catch yourself. Don't do it, don't look at the dashboard or the windscreen, from the inside of the auto-rickshaw, to see whether there is a 786 anywhere, or a Hanuman, a Jai Mata Di, or a Guru Nanak.
I don't know what my point is; or whether this was supposed to have a point.
The liberals, the fundamentalists, they're all the same. Bottomline, peer pressure doesn't happen only to teenagers. How far are we from being fundamentalists? How close to it?
I added this article [written by Samina Mishra] to my blog as an act of...solidarity? I don't know exactly how to say it. I didn't think the article was making any point. I told Sabah as much. But now I realise that it is incredibly difficult to make a point. To take a stand.
It has taken me years to write this; I have been wanting to write about my relationship with Sabah for so long. Why has is taken so long for me to write it? I'm a writer, after all!
When we were about 10-12, our group in school (it was a co-ed, but groups are one sex only!) had me (Tamil), Sabah (Muslim), Mouli* (Bengali) and Chanchal* (Punjabi). We were really proud of this. We knew we were different. We are, naturally. But we were happy about it. How strange it sounds now.
Why is Seher Khan a remarkable woman? I don't know exactly, but she certainly inspired me to write this.
Amreeka!
(So) how are we to free our selves from what the Pa rents said?
(The) Pa rents rule our lives when li ving; ev en when they're dead!
(A) me ri cans can talk to shrinks, and hosts of break fast shows;
(In) In di a we live with what we get un til it grows
(Un) bear a ble to des per a tion, and we mis con clude
(Ki) "Am ree ka hi theek hai, boss, this coun try is toh screwed!"
* * *
This was written on the spur of the moment, but these days I'm less and less inclined to believe that poetry (to misquote the greatest Romantic poet) is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, and more and more that it is recollected (in tranquility, or not!).
Anyway, I wanted to play around with meter and rhythm, and was curious to see what happens to the scansion of the lines, especially the Hindi words, when they're exaggeratedly highlighted.
I remembered the book I was reading this summer, hunting for inspiration or direction while composing Wind, Sand and Stars:
Music Composition for Dummies. Yes, there such a book. The book mentioned natural speech rhythms, and I found it really fascinating: another thing I have always been interested in is mapping the frequencies of speech, not just "nervous=shrill", but a Speech Pattern Graph.
This little stanza is an attempt to capture the natural cadence of what is, I suppose, urban Indian speech.
The emphasis, in decreasing order, is:
bold italics > bold > regular > (parenthesised)
(The) Pa rents rule our lives when li ving; ev en when they're dead!
(A) me ri cans can talk to shrinks, and hosts of break fast shows;
(In) In di a we live with what we get un til it grows
(Un) bear a ble to des per a tion, and we mis con clude
(Ki) "Am ree ka hi theek hai, boss, this coun try is toh screwed!"
* * *
This was written on the spur of the moment, but these days I'm less and less inclined to believe that poetry (to misquote the greatest Romantic poet) is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, and more and more that it is recollected (in tranquility, or not!).
Anyway, I wanted to play around with meter and rhythm, and was curious to see what happens to the scansion of the lines, especially the Hindi words, when they're exaggeratedly highlighted.
I remembered the book I was reading this summer, hunting for inspiration or direction while composing Wind, Sand and Stars:
Music Composition for Dummies. Yes, there such a book. The book mentioned natural speech rhythms, and I found it really fascinating: another thing I have always been interested in is mapping the frequencies of speech, not just "nervous=shrill", but a Speech Pattern Graph.
This little stanza is an attempt to capture the natural cadence of what is, I suppose, urban Indian speech.
The emphasis, in decreasing order, is:
bold italics > bold > regular > (parenthesised)
Intermediate Technology
There ain't no such thing as Basic Infrastructure.
Infrastucture, by definition, is complicated!
Over twenty years ago, around 1981-2, in Kanpur, a decrepit town in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, when my dad still held a pilot's license, he and my mother met a couple of slightly older, much more worldly folks called David Drury and Asifa Kanji, who had been married a few years, while my parents were fresh out of honeymoonland. I believe the story goes that Appa was giving joyrides down at IIT-K and they met there, victims, I guess, of mutual curiosity, and one thing led to another and my folks invited home two extraordinary people who were to my dad, I can only imagine, one suspiciously well-read Yankee and one terribly intelligent and lovely young woman of unascertainable extraction.
One of the more memorable things Uncle Dave (yes, he's UncaDave to me) did during that stint in Kanpur was write some wonderful songs (well he finished his Ph.D. on the side, but who cares!). One of these, one of my favourites, was called (or has been called in retrospect) Talkin' Memsahib Blues.
As Arlo Guthrie would say,
and so forth.
[I finally transcribed the lyrics from the CD that was made from the original tape recording from the 80s and found its way to us because we met David and Asifa last year (I met them for the first time, and finally heard live so many songs I had growin up listening to) after so many.]
Infrastucture, by definition, is complicated!
Over twenty years ago, around 1981-2, in Kanpur, a decrepit town in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, when my dad still held a pilot's license, he and my mother met a couple of slightly older, much more worldly folks called David Drury and Asifa Kanji, who had been married a few years, while my parents were fresh out of honeymoonland. I believe the story goes that Appa was giving joyrides down at IIT-K and they met there, victims, I guess, of mutual curiosity, and one thing led to another and my folks invited home two extraordinary people who were to my dad, I can only imagine, one suspiciously well-read Yankee and one terribly intelligent and lovely young woman of unascertainable extraction.
One of the more memorable things Uncle Dave (yes, he's UncaDave to me) did during that stint in Kanpur was write some wonderful songs (well he finished his Ph.D. on the side, but who cares!). One of these, one of my favourites, was called (or has been called in retrospect) Talkin' Memsahib Blues.
As Arlo Guthrie would say,
"It's called, ya know, Talkin', 'cos it's a talking kinda song, ya know. And it's about this memsahib, ya know, so it's called the Talkin' Memsahib Blues. That's why it is that it goes by that name"
and so forth.
[I finally transcribed the lyrics from the CD that was made from the original tape recording from the 80s and found its way to us because we met David and Asifa last year (I met them for the first time, and finally heard live so many songs I had growin up listening to) after so many.]
Talkin’ Memsahib Blues
[D.D.: I'll try, we'll see what happens, it's the first time I've done the whole thing.
Ok, this is written from Asifa's point of view alright, this is her talking through the song.]
Ah yes, those happy hours I spent
When we heard about our research grant.
Six hundred a month is chickenfeed
But in India that means Memsahib,
Servants - cringing, crawling minions,
Gin and tonic on the veranda.
Well we made our home in Kanpore town,
The very finest place around
If you like dacoits, filth and thieves,
Flies and small-scale industries.
You mean you dragged me half way 'round the world to live in Cleveland?
Wouldn't you really rather study tourism in Goa?
Well I suppose if you have gone crazy m'boy
You'll need someone to take care of you.
Well we soon moved out from IIT
To the Bima Vihar Colony.
New red brick but just next door
Was the engulfed village of Lakhanpore,
The super-boonies:
Calling a goatherd to get your grass cut;
The milkman: the milkman brings the milk right to your doorstep
In the buffalo!
But life was never dull, you see
We had no lack of company
Toads and mice and fleas and slugs,
Lizards and birds and Kamikazi bugs-
Mega zillions of them
Dying gloriously in your food, your tea, your shoes, and your toilet-paper.
And like all fanatics, it's impossible to reason with 'em
To clean house, wash clothes and get to the station
You have to be a Master of Industrial Relations.
Bring your laundry in on Tuesday,
Pick it up again on Doomsday.
"Oh, you mean you wanted it this week?
I'll absolutely, certainly and pukka positively bring your clothes tomorrow.
Or the next day."
When the washerman quit and we fired the maid
My own two hands were all I had.
In my fondest memories I clearly see
The joys of Intermediate Technology
Like cooking dinner for fifteen people on a one-burner kerosene stove
Or whipping clothes off the line during a Monsoon downpour
Or turning on the tank so you can wash the pot to boil the water to put in the cooling jar to brush your teeth with.
I was choked to the gills with fear and trepidation
When the old man went out and bought his own transportation,
The old Lambretta he could barely get to run ,
And the author of the traffic code: Atilla the Hun!
Roads that look like they were recovering from recent mortar attacks.
We share the street with hand-carts, elephants, tempos, buffalos, camels and bicycles.
Kanpur has a zoo,
But the road is closer.
I'll give you a very useful driving tip if you're out that way, by the way:
Don't ever pull up too close behind an elephant at a long stop light.
Like life I could go on and on,
But what's the use?
And still I wouldn't trade that year for most I've had,
For a first time 'round, weren't too bad.
But you aren't about to hear me ask for a second round!
All in all, one good thing you've got to say about living in Kanpur:
It feels so good when you stop!
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